St. George and St. Michael Volume III eBook

line across Lady’s face had for a moment, on
Dick’s part, somewhat impeded, had become very
restless. At length an expostulatory whinny from
Lady called Richard to his duty, and with compunctions
of heart the pair hurried to mount. They rode
home together in a bliss that would have been too deep
almost for conscious delight but that their animals
were eager after motion, and as now the surface of
the fields had grown soft, they turned into them,
and a tremendous gallop soon brought their gladness
to the surface in great fountain throbs of joy.

CHAPTER LIX.

Ave! Vale! Salve!

And now must I bury my dead out of my sight—­bid
farewell to the old resplendent, stately, scarred,
defiant Raglan, itself the grave of many an old story,
and the cradle of the new, and alas! in contrast with
the old, not merely the mechanical, but the unpoetic
and commonplace, yes vulgar era of our island’s
history. Little did lord Herbert dream of the
age he was initiating—­of the irreverence
and pride and destruction that were about to follow
in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating,
turning beauty into ashes, and worse! That divine
mechanics should thus, through selfishness and avarice,
be leagued with filth and squalor and ugliness!
When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises—­not
at the storm of iron which battered its walls to powder,
hardly even at the decree to level them with the dust,
but at the later destroyer who could desecrate the
beauty yet left by wrath and fear, who with the stones
of my lady’s chamber would build a kennel, or
with the carved stones of chapel or hall a barn or
cowhouse! What would the inventor of the water-commanding
engine have said to the pollution of our waters, the
destruction of the very landmarks of our history, the
desecration of ruins that ought to be venerated for
their loveliness as well as their story! Would
he not have broken it to pieces, that the ruin it
must occasion might not be laid to his charge?
May all such men as for the sake of money constitute
themselves the creators of ugliness, not to speak
of far worse evils in the land, live—­or
die, I care not which—­to know in their own
selves what a lovely human Psyche lies hid even in
the chrysalis of a railway-director, and to loathe
their past selves as an abomination—­incredible
but that it had been. He who calls such a wish
a curse, must undergo it ere his being can be other
than a blot.

But this era too will pass, and truth come forth in
forms new and more lovely still.